Dizzy: The Jason Gillespie Story

By Jason Gillespie

The long-awaited autobiography of one of Australia's finest sportsmen
A key member of one of the greatest Australian teams in cricket history, and part of an exceptional bowling line-up that dominated opposition batsmen for a decade, Jason Gillespie gives his fascinating account of a life in cricket in Dizzy: the Jason Gillespie Story. the first player of Aboriginal descent to represent Australia at test level, Jason grew up obsessed with the game. Little did he realise his remarkable career would feature such dramatic highs and lows, including helping Australia claim the Ashes four times in succession; breaking his leg in a horrifying accidental collision in the field with Steve Waugh; taking on and getting the better of such legendary batsmen as Brian Lara and Sachin tendulkar; being dropped during the 2005 Ashes series; scoring a brilliant double century against Bangladesh, and ultimately carving his name in the record books as one of the top Australian wickettakers of all-time. In Dizzy: the Jason Gillespie Story, Jason takes us through the tours, tests and trials of playing for Australia during an unforgettable era of cricket in this country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Apr 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780730445197

Jason Gillespie

Jason Gillespie, the first acknowledged Aboriginal Australian to become a Test cricketer, and one of the country’s best sportsmen, takes us through the tours, Tests and trials of playing for one of the most successful teams in Australia’s cricketing history. He lives in Adelaide.

Book preview

1

Born sporty

APPARENTLY THERE WAS NO CRICKET BALL CURLED UP IN MY hand when I came into the world on 19 April 1975. Hard to imagine because I’ve spent so much of my life in and around cricket since then. I was the first-born child of Vicki and Neil Gillespie. Two-and-a-half years later they welcomed my brother Rob, and in 1987 Luke’s birth completed the trifecta. We were just like any other young family; Dad was the one who worked and Mum did a great job bringing us boys up and didn’t go out to work. It was a busy time growing up as apart from school we all had our own interests.

My first memory is of the excitement when Mum and Dad bought a block of land in Bangor, southwest of Sydney. While the house was being built, we rented for a year in Dharruk, out in the western part of Sydney towards Penrith. The school I went to was just down the end of the street and I used to ride there on my bike.

As a kid, I was sports mad from the word go. From about the age of four I played soccer and got straight into it. My first team was called the Emerton Rovers; two women coached us. When we moved to Bangor, I played for a team called the Menai Hawks.

Drawn to cricket

I DIDN’T PLAY CRICKET UNTIL WE MOVED TO BANGOR. THERE was no school cricket so I ended up playing for the Illawong Cricket Club. Mum and Dad both had a strong involvement, running me around to practice and games. Plus I played in the front yard and on the road in front of the house with the rubbish bin as the wicket, as kids do.

Thanks to Father Christmas one year, I received my first decent cricket bat, a Stuart Surridge ‘Oval Supercover’. We had muck-around bats at home and there was also a Symonds ‘Super Tusker’ in the team kit at Illawong Cricket Club. I opened the batting there so I had first choice of bats and would always pick that bat because it was a corker to use.

Dad liked to watch the cricket and reckons I was mesmerised by Dennis Lillee. When I started playing at Illawong Cricket Club, I used to bowl off a long run and try and mimic him. I won the Junior Cricketer of the Year at Illawong in 1985 at the age of 10, which gave me a big boost. At that stage I was like most young cricketers in that I did a bit of bowling and batting and really didn’t know what I was best at.

My first ever proper holiday away with the family was on the south coast of New South Wales and we were staying in this house that was right on the beach. I must have been about eight. I remember not wanting to go down to the beach because the cricket was on the television. I was glued to the box watching these one-day internationals, and Australia was playing. I had to watch every ball. Unless it was a drinks break in the game, I wouldn’t even leave the TV to go to the toilet. Thirty seconds between overs didn’t give me enough time and I didn’t want to risk missing a ball, so if I had to do anything I’d wait until that two or three minutes off for drinks then I’d grab something to eat or race to the toilet.

Nothing has really changed since. I was a massive cricket ‘nuffy’ (autograph collector) back then, and although I’ve discontinued that hobby, when I’m watching a game, I never like to miss a ball.

In the garage under our house in Sydney, I painted a set of stumps in green paint on the brown wall and I used to bowl at them for hours on end. It was about a half pitch, and I’d throw a tennis ball against the wall, then hit it. That was something I did until the age of about 15, even after we moved to Adelaide. Although I wasn’t supposed to, I used to play inside as well and was often in trouble for smashing a ball and knocking over a photo on the mantelpiece.

Mum is a pretty quiet sort of person, but she is also a very committed person and would insist that if we started a season playing a sport, we had to finish it, we couldn’t pull out of things midway. Both Mum and Dad encouraged me and my brothers, Rob and Luke, to play sport rather than sit around and bum around the house.

Whereas Rob and Luke liked playing sport up to a point, I was absolutely obsessed with sport. They used to join in sometimes with the backyard sporting activities, but you could tell their heart wasn’t always in it.

Rob had a go at cricket and played some baseball and soccer when we were kids. We used to kick the soccer ball around together sometimes, but he was more into making and building things than playing sport. He’s a very good artist.

Luke is about 10 years younger than me. His great love is animals; maybe he’ll end up being a vet one day. He never really took cricket on. Although he bowled a few leggies, basically he wasn’t interested. For a while Luke played tennis and was winning against lads of the same age who’d been playing much longer than he had. After a match he used to come home and complain of tiredness. He had a coach who was pushing him quite hard because he could see he had some natural ability. At the start of high school, Luke was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, which lasted for five or six years. Now that’s behind him and he’s aiming at becoming a personal trainer.

In the genes

MY MUM, VICKI, WAS TALENTED AT SPORT. AT SCHOOL, SHE WAS a good runner; she used to run in bare feet. Her mother, Kaliope Angelina, was from the Greek island of Kithera, and her father, Robert, has an Irish background. Mum has five sisters. She’s little, just over 1.60 metres tall, because as a child she had Craniopharyngioma, which is a tumour near the pituitary gland that affects your physical development. It caused Mum to go blind, too. Luckily, when she was about 14, she had an operation that fixed the problem although she was still left with sight in only one eye. Within six months of that surgery, she was just like any other teenage girl. But before that she used to get teased a lot and became quite self-conscious. She left school very young and went to work at a department store in Sydney called Wynn’s.

There’s been sporting influence from Dad’s side, too. Dad used to play cricket and ran in a few half-marathons as well. He still likes to keep fit and does plenty of exercising and running. He was very good at golf as a young fellow, but doesn’t quite get enough time to play these days.

Dad’s father was John Anderson Morris Gillespie, who was of Anglo Saxon Heritage. His mum was Valda Hazel Devine, whose father, Jack Albert, was from the Kamilaroi Aboriginal tribe. The Kamilaroi clan came from near Moree in northern New South Wales.

When Dad first set eyes on Mum, he was 22 and she was 18. His brother, Ian, had actually been in Mum’s class at school. Not that that gave Dad a head-start because she couldn’t stand Ian. In class, he used to poke Mum with his pencil, and she hated that. Anyway, at that time Dad was working as a bank officer with the Rural Bank, which later became the State Bank of New South Wales. He spotted Mum one day when he was out buying lunch, and he asked his friend, ‘Who is that good-looking girl over there?’ Sharon, his sister, also happened to work at Wynn’s department store, and through her, Dad asked Mum out on a date.

The story goes that Mum knocked Dad back half a dozen times and it was only because her mother and older sister, Neeva, talked her into it that she decided to go out with him. Apparently Dad looked more like 32 than 22, for some reason.

For their first outing, Dad borrowed Ian’s car—a purple Ford Escort panel van. There’s a touch of irony that Mum went on her first date with my father in the car of the boy who’d teased her at school. At my parents’ wedding, Mum went up to Uncle Ian and said to him, ‘I bet you didn’t think I’d end up being your sister-in-law!’

DAD WORKED PRETTY MUCH NINE TILL FIVE, SO HE MADE TIME to be involved with me and my brothers when we were growing up. The three of us often had varying interests. I was right into my cricket, so Dad and I would go off to the nets and play for half an hour. Then he would go and see what Rob and Luke were doing, to be fair in allocating his time. Dad is also a determined sort of man. He worked really hard and did extra study to achieve high goals—he studied for his CPA at night school while still holding down a full-time job. Then, when we lived at Dharruk, Dad bought himself a 125cc motorbike to travel to his second job. At nights he used to teach accounting and economics at a technical college to make a bit of extra money for the family. He was, and still is, an awesome role model and has a great ‘can do’ attitude. He always made time for us no matter how tired he was. He also thinks he’s pretty funny—he’s the only one! Perhaps that’s where my determination and prankster sense of humour come from. I hope I can live up to his example with my own kids.

In between school and sport, I was quite lucky that chores around the house never really existed. Mum and Dad would try to impose the idea of chores but after one or two nights that would fall by the wayside. I absolutely hated doing dishes or tidying up when I could be outside playing cricket or kicking the soccer ball or footy about.

The funny thing is, while I used to kick a footy around a lot as a kid, I never played an organised game in my life. When I was 12, I played in a game with Dad’s workmates, but had no real idea what I was doing out there.

Swimming is one sport I never took to. Early on, I did swimming classes at Sutherland Pool in Sydney, basic learn-to-swim stuff. At nine or 10, I got a certificate for swimming 4 metres freestyle and for 20 metres back sculling, which was a massive effort for me because I was a little bit scared of the water at that stage. Like all kids I didn’t mind having a dip but was never keen on organised swimming. Now that I have a pool at home, I do laps as a warm-up to get the body loose and get me going in the morning, but that’s about it.

I don’t remember a lot of my early primary school days but do recall enjoying being there. I did okay at my school work. Martin School was where I was first enrolled and I spent a year there. In Year 2, at Menai Primary School, we did this fantastic class project. Each pupil wrote a letter, attached it to a helium balloon then let it go, hoping someone would find it and write back. My reply came back from someone only 300 metres away. One of my classmates received a reply from someone who was about 10 kilometres or so away.

By Year 3, almost everything in my life was based around sport, even though I did quite well at school. Like my mother, I was a reasonable runner and used to finish in the top two or three in the races at our school athletics carnival.

WHEN I WAS EIGHT OR NINE, I MANAGED TO CONTRACT Guillain-Barré syndrome, a potentially life-threatening disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks part of the nervous system. I noticed I was having trouble walking and kept falling down. Soon after being admitted to St George Hospital, I became paralysed from the waist down. It was a very stressful time, particularly for Mum and Dad. They were worried that I might need some sort of blood transfusion; AIDS had been around for a while, and they were paranoid about blood transfusions. Fortunately, that never eventuated. With treatment, I was fine in about a week, but it was scary, to say the least.

Growing up a South Australian

WE MOVED TO ADELAIDE WHEN I WAS 10, AND I CONTINUED being right into sport. I did Years 6 and 7 at Flagstaff Hill Primary School, where I made some lifelong friends. My first memory of Jono Grant is of him making fishing flies in class. I had no idea about fishing so I asked him what it was all about. We just clicked. Like me, he played cricket at school and was into other sports, too. Later, he and I had a $1000 bet that I would play for Australia. He hasn’t paid out yet and I don’t think he ever will; I’m not holding that against him. Jono and I were in the same class in Year 7 at Flagstaff Hill, and because he was going to Cabra Dominican College for high school, as was another friend, Darren Starr, I decided to go there too. I wasn’t Catholic, I just wanted to go to there because that’s where my mates from primary school were going. At Cabra, I met Paul Bernhardt, and the four of us have been best mates ever since.

We had some great times, playing sport at recess and lunchtimes, living and breathing sport. The four of us all loved our tennis, cricket and footy, and played basketball together right through high school. At the time I thought I was okay, but in reality I was a pretty ordinary basketballer. Jono and Paul had a lot more talent than me around the hoops. Mr Jarrad, the basketball coach, was a very positive sort of person and someone I looked up to. He also taught me Physical Education.

In Year 8 I played a few cricket games for Cabra College but when I discovered that Cabra weren’t serious about the sport, I lost interest in playing for the school and concentrated on playing at Adelaide Cricket Club. Basketball was the main sport I played at school. I tried squash for a year or two and while I enjoyed it, I didn’t love it as much as cricket.

At school, I practised cricket quite hard at lunchtimes and sometimes after school, but I had a few injuries in my back in the early days. At the end of Year 9, I was one of the shortest students in my class. By the start of Year 10 I was the tallest. During the holidays I’d sky-rocketed 15 centimetres. Unfortunately, back trouble was the legacy of that growth spurt.

OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL, IT WASN’T ALL SPORT. AT THE TEN PIN bowling alley on Cross Road, just along from Cabra College, they had an arcade game called Wonder Boy, which we played quite often. As an adult, I have tried to relive my childhood by buying a Wonder Boy machine, which I’ve had for years now.

I can’t say I was picked on or bullied at school, but I wasn’t over-popular, either. Although I liked girls, I was a bit too shy and embarrassed to get too close. Cabra was a co-ed school, and I could hold good conversations with girls in my class but that was about it. At high school I was really timid. Occasionally a girl might call in at home and that would freak me out. I had no idea how to handle it if I liked a girl or if a girl liked me.

MY SPARE TIME USED TO INVOLVE GOING TO THE BASKETBALL COURT to shoot a few hoops, kicking a footy around on my own or playing cricket by myself or with some mates, if they were around. Our house backed onto Flagstaff Hill Golf Club and sometimes I would sneak onto the course, play a few holes and have a bit of a putt on the greens. I don’t think anyone from the club minded too much. I’ve never been much of a golfer. I think it’s because I was self-taught and haven’t improved—but I still enjoy a round, even though I don’t hit the ball too well.

Sport was everything to me. I scraped through in Year 10 and by Years 11 and 12, lessons were almost filling in time between my next training session, be it basketball or cricket. My real ambition was to be a professional cricketer. Not that I wanted to abandon my studies. I thought I might want to be a Phys. Ed. teacher or a policeman, things that would work in with my cricket. While my mates all took the challenging courses—Maths I and II, Physics and Chemistry—I chose subjects that interested me—Business Maths, Biological Science and Physical Education. Luckily for me, in Years 11 and 12, Mrs Wheaton was my Maths teacher. She was very experienced and explained stuff clearly. Under her influence, I worked hard and did pretty well.

In Adelaide, if you wanted to get into university, in Year 12 you had to take five PES, or Public Examined Subjects. The trouble was I couldn’t find more than three PES subjects that I liked. I ended up repeating Year 12 and took Media Studies, which I thought was relevant to what I wanted to do down the track. As it has turned out, that was one of the most useful subjects I did at school. Although I qualified to go to university, in the end I chose not to go as I didn’t want it to interfere with potential opportunities to play cricket.

MY FRIENDS ALL DID WELL. PAUL PLAYED STATE LEAGUE basketball in Perth and has built a career in the mining industry, Darren became a town planner, and Jono is a finance manager.

All four of us keep in touch. Paul’s sister, Michelle, married Darren Starr, and we are a pretty close group. Each year we have a Boxing Day Test pub crawl in the Eastern Suburbs of Adelaide. In 2006, Paul made the effort to come over for it from Perth, where he’s lived since he was 19. He and I catch up whenever I’m playing in Perth.

Simon Burke, another former schoolmate from Cabra, introduced us to Mark Barrington, who became good mates with all of us. We used to call him Dancing Baz because he loved strutting his stuff and bopping away. One night, we were at a nightclub in Adelaide called Joplins. Mark was wearing a blue chambray shirt and a tie with fish on it. After a few drinks, he started to tear up the dance floor. To egg him on, we were buying girls drinks on the proviso they would go up to Baz and tell him he was the best dancer they’d ever seen. After a while his head was starting to swell, and he was sweating up a storm in this blue shirt he was wearing. Soon the security staff noticed him, but they were unimpressed. They came over and told us that no sane person could dance like that and he had to go. Baz was the first and only person I’ve ever known to be kicked out of a club for bad dancing.

When we were in our early twenties, Jono and his then girlfriend Lisa—they’re married now—were over at my place one day and we decided we’d make some home-brewed beer, which we duly did. Jono’s middle name is Reuben, which explains the name, Ruebenbrew, and we even came up with a logo. Then we found an old fridge, which we gutted. We put our beer keg inside, and ran the tap outside of the fridge. Ruebenbrew took down a few people over the next few years.

Jono’s parents, Julie and Terry, were a tremendous support when I bought a house at Flagstaff Hill in 1998. Julie helped me plan out the garden, which was a bit of a mess when I first moved in. After training, I used to drop in to their deli and pick up some lunch and a paper. They were kind enough to have me around for dinner every second night because I was hopeless as a cook. Tuesday night at the Grants’ place was card night, and Jono’s grandfather would chug around in his old Toyota Corolla car and join us for a game. He was the tightest man alive, often fighting for a five or ten cent bet. When he was driving downhill in his car he would often turn off the engine and freewheel to save petrol! He was a lovely man and passed away only a few years ago.

Steadily improving as a cricketer

SOMETIMES I WONDER WHETHER THE ENVIRONMENT AND opportunities to play cricket would have come my way had my family stayed in Sydney. We arrived in Adelaide in 1985, halfway through the season, and Dad started playing at Pembroke Old Scholars. Although I wasn’t playing, Dad used to bring me along to the games to get me involved and keep me interested. Before the season was out I got a game and batted in the order ahead of Dad, which I think he found slightly embarrassing.

At the start of the following season, Dad was resolute about organising a District cricket club for me, not realising that where you lived determined where you were supposed to play. He rang the South Australia Cricket Association and was put on to Sturt District Cricket Club, which was the club closest to us. Whoever it was Dad spoke to said, ‘We don’t care how good your lad is, we’ve got players as good if not better and we don’t want him.’ That seemed uppity. When Dad got in touch with the Adelaide Cricket Club, the response couldn’t have been more welcoming. The junior organiser told him that while they had quite a few kids, they’d love to see me and would try to find a game for me somewhere. So that’s how I ended up playing with the mighty Buffalos. I started with Adelaide Cricket Club in Year 6, was soon playing in the State Bank Shield competition, and I’ve been with the club ever since. I was very proud when they made me a Life Member.

My first game with adults was when Dad was playing for Pembroke Old Scholars. I just filled in for them. I was playing State Bank Shield in the mornings and the odd game with the Under-14s in the afternoon for Adelaide. If I didn’t play Under-14s, I’d fill in with Dad’s team. I’d bat right down the order and managed to get the odd 10 or 20 here and there. I think the old blokes were taking it easy on me when they bowled but I remember playing a few games and enjoying it.

IN THE 1991–92 SEASON, AT THE AGE OF 16, I HAD MY FIRST YEAR playing senior cricket for the Adelaide Cricket Club. I played D grade and some E grade but only as a batsman. I’d hurt my back, so I couldn’t bowl. Gradually it came right. My first big haul was in D grade, when I took 8/38 from 34 overs straight at Jack Fox Oval. My good mate Paul Amato, ‘Tommy’ as he is known, has a ‘claim to fame’ from that same game. In the scorebook it is recorded that one of the batsmen was dismissed stumped—Amato bowled Gillespie. He is pretty pumped about that and it tends to come out whenever we have a few beers.

Once my back improved and I picked up a few wickets in the Ds, I went up a grade. A huge bonus awaited me because the C-grade skipper was a fantastic guy named Shane Bernhardt. Shane had been my State Bank Shield coach when I first came to Adelaide as a kid. When I was 12 or 13, he also worked with me one-on-one, coaching me in my batting. Later on, we would work together again when he coached Adelaide to an A-grade premiership. Since then, he’s gone on to become the Grade cricket coordinator for the South Australian Cricket Association. Shane was a major influence early on in my cricket, and I have the highest respect for him.

Shane’s support was vital during this transition to senior cricket. I was a fairly shy teenager and at that level, the game was starting to get serious. In those first few games in the C-grade team, I wasn’t setting the world on fire. The first week I tried playing in the C-grade side, I got 1/40 in eight overs, bowling quite quick against West Torrens at Kings Reserve West.

Then, one night at training late in the 1992–93 season, something happened. I’d been telling my teammates that I’d be playing for South Australia by the time I was 19 and that by the age of 21, I’d play for Australia. As you’d expect, they were having a good laugh about my statements. My mate Paul Amato, in particular, was taking the piss out of me, calling me ‘The Lion of Adelaide’, and going on about how I was big-noting myself. That fired me up. Until then, I’d been bowling medium pace in the nets, but then I decided to mark out a long run and try and bowl as fast as I could. Determined to show them they were wrong to underestimate me, I marked out my run and tried to bowl flat out. I was getting them through okay and showed a bit of pace for a 17-year-old bowler.

Our club coach, Steve Trenorden, noticed what was happening and asked, ‘Who’s that?’ He must have liked what he saw because for the last game of the season he decided to give me a run with his A-grade team. By then the As were out of the race for the finals, and there had been a few injuries late in the season. Steve must have thought, ‘Let’s give this young tearaway a go.’

Dad wasn’t at all keen on me making my A-grade debut with Adelaide. As an E-grade captain, he was part of the club’s selection committee. Dad felt it was too early even for me to play B grade, let alone A grade. Steve Trenorden told Dad that I was more than ready, was one of the quickest bowlers in the club and should go up. It turned out that Dad was the only one who didn’t want me to play up. It was decided I’d have a go with the B-grade team.

Anyway, on the Friday night before my planned debut in B grade, there was another injury in the A-grade side, so I was contacted and told that I was selected for A grade.

Dad wasn’t too thrilled but he and Mum were there supporting me the next day. I took the new ball and got a wicket in my first over. It was a guy called Marcus Arula, caught behind by Warren ‘Bugsy’ Smith. When Dad had to leave to captain his E-grade side, he said to Mum, ‘He’s proven me wrong. I know nothing about cricket.’ My figures were 2/70 from 22 overs against Woodville, so I did reasonably well in my first game.

In a way, that training session when I copped a sledging from the lads because of my cocky predictions was a turning point in my cricket career. I remember thinking, ‘Stuff you blokes, I need to do something about this.’ After I got home from training, I changed my gear and went out for a run. ‘It starts now,’ I thought. ‘I’ve got to get fit.’ From that moment I started doing push-ups and sit-ups in front of the TV to get stronger. I started putting pressure on myself to dig deeper and to really achieve.

AT THE END OF 1992–93 SEASON, DAD WAS OFFERED A JOB IN Canberra and accepted it. Mum and my brothers joined Dad in Canberra, but I decided to stay in Adelaide as I was doing Year 13 at Cabra College and I felt for a couple of reasons it would be best if I stayed put. First, I didn’t want to interrupt my schooling, and second, and more importantly, the ACT didn’t have a First Class cricket team and at that time it was becoming a real goal for me.

I lived with an Adelaide Cricket Club teammate, Dave Castello, and his grandmother, Beryl, who looked after me too well. We were in the self-contained unit on the side of the house, all under the one roof but we had our own door, which was handy. Beryl was an immense support to me and looked after us, doing all the cooking and cleaning. She was the kindest lady to us both and was like a grandmother to me. Living in Adelaide, she was tremendous support as my paternal grandmother died fairly early in my life and my maternal grandmother lived in Newcastle. To have that love and support from Beryl was pretty special.

Dave and I were good mates and became close friends, and are very close to this day. Dave now lives in Albury, New South Wales, with his wife, Angela, and is a bit of a legend at North Albury Cricket Club where he is a swashbuckling left-handed batsman and tries to bowl right arm medium pace, without too much luck.

Without that sort of support from Beryl and Dave, I am not sure I would have been able to get through that final year of schooling and my involvement with cricket.

SOMETIMES I HAVE TO PINCH MYSELF WHEN I LOOK BACK AND see how it has all panned out. I did make my State debut at 19 and my Test debut at 21. The reason I felt I could achieve those goals was because I was absolutely prepared to do the work needed and the belief I had in myself to achieve those goals was there. Being ‘loud and proud’ isn’t everybody’s way, but sometimes it pays to think big.

2

A big first year as a First Class cricketer

IT CAME AS A BOLT FROM THE BLUE WHEN I WAS PICKED TO PLAY for South Australia for the first time. I’ll never forget the shock. I was at the Caltex petrol station at O’Halloran Hill, and the bloke behind the counter had the radio on. The announcer was reading out the side for the forthcoming one-day game against the touring Zimbabweans; I caught the words ‘Jason Gillespie’ and ‘debut for South Australia’. I wasn’t sure I’d heard right.

Admittedly I’d had a strong start to the season with Adelaide CC, but even though I was bowling well I wasn’t getting many wickets in club cricket. When I arrived at training the news was confirmed. It was quite a bizarre feeling to know I was going to debut for SA!

It was a proud moment when I walked out onto Adelaide Oval on 27 November 1994 with the likes of Darren Lehmann and Greg Blewett. The Zimbabweans won the toss and batted but only made 186 and we beat them by seven wickets. I took 4 for 30 that day, which was a respectable start to my First Class cricketing career.

Bomber offers a steadying hand

ONCE I MADE THE STATE SIDE, FOR THE REST OF THE 1994–95 season I spent every Tuesday and Thursday night training at the South Australia Cricket Association nets under the watchful eye of coach Jeff ‘Bomber’ Hammond. The Adelaide Oval has superb facilities, and I wanted to get used to bowling on that wicket. I meant no disrespect